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Friday, November 4th, Hearing Systems invited collaboration partners, colleagues and alumni for this year’s Presentation Day to give an overview of the activities in the research group. This year the presentation took place at a new location, the new laboratory building. This turned out to be a success.

Torsten Dau, Head of Hearing Systems, gave an introduction with an overview of the research group and the activities. It has grown over the years and currently consists of 22 PhD students and 11 postdocs. Torsten took the audience on a historical journey from the start thirteen years ago as CAHR (Centre for Applied Hearing Research) til now when Hearing Systems also includes the new fundamental research centre CHeSS (Oticon Centre of Excellence for Hearing and Speech Science). The two centres have a close collaboration with various partners and external experts, including several EU projects, e.g. COCOHA (Cognitive Control of a Hearing Aid Horizon 2020). This year, CHeSS started as participating partner in the large scale project BEAR (Better Hearing Rehabilitation).
“24 PhD projects have completed since 2003. All of the previous PhD students are now employed, either in the industry or in research, some of them here in the group. 18 PhDs are employed in the hearing aid industry, four are currently postdocs and two have positions as Assistant and Associate Professors. These activities have been crucial for our success, also thanks to your support, which is essential and we hope that we can continue the collaboration,“ he said.
“This year, we have five PhD defenses. Four new postdocs: Federica Bianchi, Johannes Zaar, Sara Madsen andGolbarg Mehraei. And we have a new technician, Henrik Hvidberg, who started earlier this year in our group together with the Acoustic Technology group. Then we have ISAAR proceedings, thanks to GN Hearing for supporting the conference and proceedings. Since last time we met, five new PhD projects have started: Antoine Favre-Félix, Pernille Holtegaard, Raul Sanchez Lopez, Anja Kofoed Pedersen and Juan Camilo Gil Carvajal. Furthermore, we have seven bachelor projects and six master projects this year. I’m also happy to tell you that Thomas Lunner, Professor at Eriksholm Research Centre, now has a joint position here. The idea is to strengthen the collaboration with CAHR, CHeSS and COCOHA,” Torsten Dau explained.

The PhD students and Postdocs presented their current activities and research projects, mainly in the form of nine short talks and 18 posters. These presentations described the results from current Postdoc, PhD, and other research projects, starting with spatial hearing and realistic environments. Projects about auditory modelling and applications followed, ending up with attention and electric hearing.In between the many interesting talks, poster sessions took place with many opportunities to discuss the topics and to network.
Niels Søgaard Jensen, a former researcher at Eriksholm Research Centre who is now Audiological Specialist in the marketing department at Widex, found it very interesting to hear about the different projects at Hearing Systems.
“ It’s exciting still to see what is going on in the research field, to meet the new students, and to hear about the projects. It might be useful for further collaboration, and I also like the idea of being here close to the new laboratories. It is a fine way to get a quick insight of what is going on and it was very well arranged,” he said.
Karsten Bo Nielsen,Innovation and Project Manager at Oticon agreed:
“This is a much better location and it gives overview and details about the projects in an excellent way with the presentations and posters,” he said.

About Hearing Systems

Hearing Systems is one of DTU Electrical Engineering's Research Groups. We teach and conduct research into speech and hearing sciences, communication acoustics and audio and auditory signal processing.